The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,970,186 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,643,660, “System, method and computer program product for fingerprint verification,” are hereby expressly incorporated by reference in their entireties for all purposes. The '186 patent and the '660 patent describe fingerprint verification and include references to various fingerprint verification processes that may be referenced to points of interest. In some fingerprint verification systems, there are a particular class of features that are referred to as minutia. In some cases, minutia may be used as image anchors used in methods to compare a test image against one or more reference images for possible correspondence.
Minutia are generally present in an image of a whole fingerprint. As an image capture area size decreases to visualize less than a whole fingerprint, minutia are less prevalent. In certain cases minutia may be absent from any given image of a partial fingerprint.
Any fingerprint processing that relies on minutia may be inoperative or have reduced effectiveness when processing partial fingerprint images.
Increasingly there is a desire to enable use of fingerprint sensors that have a reduced imaging area as compared to whole finger sensors. Eliminating or reducing any requirement for minutia processing allows use and adoption of a wider range of sensor sizes.